Team Dashboards
The wall screen showed a leaderboard. Tickets closed this week, by name, largest first, in a font readable from the car park. Within a month the desk had discovered the fastest way up the board: close the easy tickets first and the hard ones never. It also meant splitting one request into three, and resolving a ticket the moment a reply was sent whether or not it fixed anything. The reopen rate doubled. Nobody had intended any of this. The screen had simply announced what the organisation valued, and the organisation had obliged. A dashboard is a statement of what matters, displayed where everyone can see it. Choose what it says.
This series is about choosing. It covers what a team dashboard is for, which is a shared view of now and not a scoreboard. It covers the real-time queue view, with the five counts that matter in the order to read them. It covers personal workload views, private to the technician whose work they show. Then come dashboards that motivate instead of surveil, and why the leaderboard damages the thing it was meant to improve. It covers designing the wall screen, if you have one, in six tiles readable from the door. And it covers keeping dashboards honest, because a stale tile is worse than no tile. A good dashboard answers "what needs doing now". A bad one answers "who is winning", and nobody is.
Articles in This Series
- What a Team Dashboard Is For: The Shared View of Now
The shared view of now, the questions it answers, what it must not become (a scoreboard, a report, decoration), and the purpose card. - The Real-Time Queue View: Five Counts in the Right Order
Unassigned, overdue, due soon, waiting on us, waiting on them. Covers the counts that matter and the order to read them, and the queue view specification. - Personal Workload Views: The Technician's Own Numbers
Mine, due today, waiting on me, reopened; private to the technician; the technician's own numbers as their own business; and the personal view specification. - Dashboards That Motivate Instead of Surveil
Leaderboards and the damage they do, private versus public numbers, team totals over individual ranks, the number that gets gamed the moment it is displayed, and the ethics checklist. - Designing the Wall Screen, If You Have One
Six tiles, readable from the door, colour that means something, what to leave off, the screen nobody looks at after a month, and the wall screen layout. - Keeping Dashboards Honest: The Stale Tile and the Monthly Check
The stale tile, the number nobody questions, the definition that drifted, the monthly check, and the dashboard review sheet.
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This series is part of the QuerySolv helpdesk topic library. It covers the foundations, processes, communication, knowledge, tooling, metrics, classic ticket domains, people and strategy behind a support desk that works. The library pairs well with the software we build: QuerySolv. It is a self-hosted help desk that runs as one Windows service on your own network. It is licensed once per installation, not per agent per month.